General

The ground is shifting. Soon we will be standing horizontally.

Enamored as I am of Twitter, I wonder about the long-term availability of the system. The business model might run its course or be overtaken by others offering the same service. People might grow tired of posting to or reading it.

Twitter’s ephemeral—and increasingly blasé—form may make you question the utility of preserving all that [...]

At the end of summer Sarah and I will move to Scotland (from a small, cramped island to a small, damp island, as m’lady put it). I am starting an MSc in quantitative genetics at the University of Edinburgh.

QG

Quantitative genetics (QG) is the study of traits that vary continuously, like height and weight. Rather than [...]

Twitter

Twitter is an internal monologue that other people can overhear. I decided to give it a spin when they moved to my web host. I use it with Twitterrific, and I love the way a new message from someone I’m following punctuates my workflow. It’s like the first time you had email: you hear the [...]

95% percent of my computer use at home involves the network. Since getting OmniWeb (which lets you manage browsing), I’ve been finding more ways to drop other applications in favor of web apps.

Joyent Connector

Joyent is an suite of web apps for email, calendar, contacts, and bookmarks. Although it’s currently missing some interface patterns that we’ve [...]

I don’t care for zoos, mostly because I wouldn’t want to live in one. But they are good for studying animals that wouldn’t otherwise live anywhere near your house.

Two of the chimpanzees were named Apple and Lemon. Fukunaga, who writes about these chimpanzees and whom I first met on Yakushima, showed us around. We went [...]

Vials

This week at work we’ve been switched over to plastic vials to store flies in. We had been using Pyrex* ones but, for whatever reason (economics? safety? processing convenience?), now it’s plastic.

Handling hundreds of vials every week, I had gotten used to their balance, their weight, their finish. I knew how to grip them and [...]

Tart cooking apples.